


Who Sat Not Down and Dreamed Romantic Schemes

by akathecentimetre



Series: A Gentleman's Agreement [6]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Clubbing, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Ettersburg, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Music, Public Sex, the 80s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-24
Updated: 2017-10-24
Packaged: 2019-01-22 12:54:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12482044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Thomas had walked in many a dream besides his own. He was never sure what to expect from Abdul's - certainly not an encounter in an alleyway behind a club blasting Chumbawumba (whateverthatwas).





	Who Sat Not Down and Dreamed Romantic Schemes

**Author's Note:**

> IDEK. The idea wouldn’t leave me alone, so here’s some magical dream-walking and needless angst and some actual sexytimes. **Small warnings** for war nightmares, a period-specific LGBTQ term which isn’t so popular nowadays, and other issues around coming out/being gay in the 80s. To understand part of this, it’s helpful to read fic 6 in this series, “How Little All Appears," as well as fic 1.

*

Thomas Nightingale had walked in more than enough dreams to know when he wasn’t welcome.

He had grown up being told and instructed that magic had its unfathomable mysteries, and had been quite happy to accept that assumption as fact. It didn’t much help to question things, he had learned, when it was unlikely you would ever be provided with answers. It didn’t help to wonder why your werelight sometimes itched and burned, why boys at Ambrose House had, every once in a while, woken up to find their magic simply wouldn’t work that day, or perhaps ever again; it didn’t do one any good to get worked up over the unknowns of the ghosts which lived in the corners of the school, or the corners of the Folly, or why some _vestigia,_ but not others, could knock you straight sideways into someone else’s memories.

The dreams and dreaming of practitioners were perhaps the most distant of frontiers when it came to the unknown, and everyone he encountered in the demimonde knew it. The concentration of volatile adolescent minds at Ambrose meant that the experiences you might have while you were asleep were tinged with excitement or melancholy, the side effects of missing home or a girl or wanting another boy or wanting the world. They were quick, emotional flashes which were easily forgotten when he woke up, disoriented, not knowing whose mind had provided which flash of half-reality in the dark of the crowded dormitories.

Dreaming during the war was horrific. It took him years, after 1945, to re-learn how to fall asleep for more than a few minutes at a time, so determined had he become to avoid the chance of getting sucked into someone else’s nightmare.

His own night terrors developed slowly, somewhat to his surprise, as magic started to disappear from London. His first conscious dreaming experience of the walk from Ettersburg occurred in 1950 and was silent and cold in ways which left him sitting in front of a roaring fire in his bedroom fireplace for days while he forced himself to stay awake. The second walk, in 1952, was no less distressing, but at least a little more understandable: he recognized landmarks, re-inhabited the aches of his body, knew which way to turn to follow the setting sun into the west. When he woke he felt no less in danger from himself, but coming back into a world where he knew he was alive and safe started to feel like a comfort.

After meeting Abdul in 1980, he had taken more than his usual amount of care to make sure the boundaries of his mind, which were so used to being spread about the Folly, didn’t touch the young doctor’s consciousness. He had nearly slipped up once, a couple of years into their acquaintance, when he reeled his way out of a dream of tanks and muddied, bloodied tracks in the snow, to find himself in the Folly’s library, apparently having fallen asleep mid-conversation, and saw Walid twitching his way awake in his own armchair, confusion evident in the haphazard movement of his shadow.

He had offered a clumsy explanation of the concept of dream-walking – and then a heartfelt apology – when it was properly morning, but Walid, characteristically, wouldn’t accept it.

“Not to worry, I didn’t feel a thing,” he had said, the cheerful care in his tone making clear that he seemed to think Thomas had the right to dream as he bloody well pleased. “I doubt I would, either – I don’t, you see. Dream. Well,” he added, frowning a little through his qualification, “if I do, I don’t remember them. The only ones which make an impact are if I’m half-awake. Those are horrid.”

Thomas was to learn what Walid meant only in 1990, when their sudden and welcome proximity made it much more likely they would be present in each other’s dreams far more often. Thomas found himself too unexpectedly content, in the first few months after they became intimate, to infect the bed they now shared with his memories of war; it only took a week or two, however, for him to witness the sort of half-dream Abdul suffered from, when, early one morning when Abdul was only just back from a night shift, Thomas fell asleep into a remembrance of the scene at 32 Albert St when Abdul had been attacked by the goblin.

Except this time Abdul was very clearly dead, and the goblin was victorious, and Thomas couldn’t tell where he ended and the dream version of him began as he wept.

He had, at least, learned by the time he was seventeen and more than keen to keep out of the heads of classmates, how to exit someone else’s dream of his own accord – so he did, firmly disentangling himself from what he knew was not and could not be true, and he gently shook Abdul fully awake, who gasped and started up and took a long moment to recognize where he was.

“Shit,” he’d breathed, and fell back into his pillow with a hand covering his eyes, slowly gathering calm. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Thomas insisted, returning the favor he had been given, and spent the rest of the morning rather determinedly making Abdul feel just how alive they both were; and when Abdul eventually fell asleep again, smiling, there wasn’t a trace of a dream left in him.

He found Abdul reading psychology-oriented issues of _Scientific American_ and the _Journal of Neuroscience_ somewhat more frequently than usual in the following months, but Thomas was content to let the matter drop. It had always been clear to him, after all, that dreams were places in which one could be exposed to things one’s friend, acquaintance, or partner did not want, nor indeed need, to share in the light of day; he had no intention of consciously sharing what he had buried in his mind about Ettersburg, and so it seemed no hardship not to ask or look for what Abdul didn’t tell him.

Thomas realized over the years, however, that Abdul’s assertion that he didn’t dream was incorrect.

He might not have remembered them, but Thomas could see them. Most often they were only brief, fleeting impressions, in keeping with the idea that his subconscious thought they were unimportant – nights out, exams taken again and again, misty Scottish landscapes. Sometimes they were gently amusing, proving that Abdul really was the consummate scientific obsessive, as Thomas stood by and watched Walid practice a certain surgical incision again, and again, and once more for luck, or wandered at his side among endless mental library stacks, searching for that one exquisitely helpful scholarly paper.

Other times, though, they were as melancholy and painful as any person’s could be and were. On one occasion, in 1991, Thomas had found himself standing on a small street of quaint, tilting houses, with the smell of salt water in the air, and in the company of a sturdy-looking woman with ginger hair streaking white, smoking, fatigue deep in her eyes.

 _You’re breaking your da’s heart, you know_ , she’d said, in a quiet Scottish burr, and Thomas had turned to see Abdul next to him, not looking her in the eye, skinny and pale and barely twenty in his oversized jumper as he fiddled mechanically (with the longing of the former addict, a sensation Thomas was recently becoming familiar with himself) with an unlit cigarette of his own.

Thomas had stayed in that memory for just long enough to reassure himself that it was not, in fact, what he feared that was causing the rift – and felt nauseously relieved, when he woke, that it was not Abdul’s sexuality, but his announcement that he was changing his name that had caused his invisible father to retreat into disapproval and shame, not knowing what to do with the (erroneous) idea that his eldest son was somehow renouncing him and his as well as their god.

Abdul didn’t betray any signs, the next morning, of having been aware of a moment of it – and so Thomas continued to keep it to himself, not betraying in his turn how quietly grateful he was to have been given, however unfairly, the chance to know Abdul better.

It was exceptionally rare that Abdul was aware of Thomas’s presence in any of those dreams, or that he was aware of the dreams occurring at all. But those rare times turned out, on at least one occasion, to be entirely worth it.

It was 1993, and soon after they had quietly celebrated Abdul’s thirty-fifth birthday, that Thomas emerged into a dream which would very much not have been his idea of entertaining had it not offered a very curious world to explore. It was dark, and the temperature brisk, and he was standing on the pavement outside a church – the Welsh Presbyterian Church, a weathered sign on the railings told him – on Shaftesbury Avenue. It was abundantly clear, however, that the church had not held a service for quite some time based on the evidence of the shockingly-dressed lines of young people who were standing out on the pavement with him, laughing and drinking and waiting in their dyed hair and loud jewelry to get inside – and over all, the pulsing thud of music unsuited to any mass, buzzing through the paving stones under his feet.

“Good lord,” Thomas muttered under his breath, and, despite himself, started wandering down the line to see where Abdul was. After a few minutes of searching, and having narrowly avoided the grasping attentions of one young lady who reacted to his rejection with a filthy stream of invective about bourgeois toffs, he took a breath, sank deeper into the background of the dream, and made his way inside instead, neatly avoiding the scowling bouncers defiling the handsome wooden doors.

Inside was deafening. Confusing, too, because, being who he was, Thomas had never seen a church’s quire being filled with a stage instead, nor a live house band, nor a towering transsexual singing Chumbawumba at the top of their lungs. (He clarified the identity of these things with Abdul later; in the moment he attempted, but mostly failed, to tell himself that all of these things must have been perfectly comprehensible to someone.) He certainly didn’t know enough about the whole strobe-lit mélange of it to determine when the dream was taking place: he needed to see Abdul for that, and so he continued on with his search.

He found them squeezed round a table at the back of what used to be a side chapel, shouting at each other over the noise and still not saying anything that was intelligible to Thomas’s ears. One of the young men Thomas recognized from the night when Abdul had celebrated his thirtieth, a fellow doctor from UCH; the others, though, were unknown to him, though they all looked somewhat alike, slightly older than the jumping mass of men and women in front of the stage and slightly more sensibly dressed. Abdul himself, looking tired, was wearing a t-shirt that was decorated in tribute to someone called King Crimson under his jacket, and was laughing at something that was being whispered into his ear by a dark-haired, grinning man whose feet were tipsily unsteady beneath him.

All Thomas could think was that Abdul looked noticeably younger than he was now, almost certainly younger than he had been in 1990 – and yet, despite therefore having no earthly claim to the memory’s Abdul, he couldn’t help the surge of jealousy which thrilled through him at the sight of someone else making clear what they wanted of someone who was now his.

He lost sight of them for a moment in the press of bodies; when the field cleared again in front of him they were leaving together, arms around each other’s shoulders, heading towards a small side-door set into the wall of the nave. Back on the stage, the singer was half-singing, half-shouting something about Oscar Wilde; Thomas paused before following, and paused again when he reached the door, telling himself that perhaps it would be better for all concerned, and certainly for his feelings, if he were to wake up and forget about the headiness all around him.

He slipped through eventually, closing the door in relief behind him to block out as much of the music as possible, his ears ringing, and found himself in a small inner courtyard behind the church, hemmed in by the backs of other buildings at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. And he was by no means alone there – even in the dark, it was conspicuously occupied by people in twos and threes, some huddling around a lighter to start their cigarettes, others, more hidden but barely more discreet, up to exploring each other in the corners. Nightingale stepped aside to let one drunkenly happy-looking couple go past him back into the club, averted his eyes three times before he found a patch of brick wall to stare at that didn’t have something indecent going on in front of it, and found himself rather rapidly regretting his decision to remain any longer in the dream a second longer.

But then he heard Abdul’s voice, and he couldn’t help but look, and then he couldn’t look away.

There was graffiti on the wall above them, in the dimly-lit corner they’d made their own. SMASH CLAUSE 28, it screamed, and that, finally, helped Thomas realize the year and time – because based on the fatigue and tinges of grief he’d seen in Abdul, and the reading he had finally done in the previous few years on topics he had been resolutely ignoring for decades, he knew that Clause 28, banning back into whispers all the best activism gays and lesbians in the UK had managed to achieve, had gone into effect in 1988.

So this was the same year, or perhaps just after, in early 1989, when he and Thomas had spoken in the kitchen of the Folly about things Thomas had never before dared voice, and this, here, this memory, with Abdul with his arm around someone Thomas had never seen, could only have been weeks – perhaps days – after he’d lost his friend Harry.

It was as naked and desperately-needed an attempt at intimacy as Thomas had ever encountered.

“I missed you,” the dark-haired man was saying, with his mouth on Abdul’s neck.

“Come off it, Dom,” Abdul said, not unkindly. “You’re never lonely enough to miss anyone.”

“Yeah, but I missed this,” Dom grinned, and Thomas took a sharp breath and stepped back, shrinking himself back into the darkest, smokiest patch of air he could find, as Dom’s hands went for Abdul’s belt buckle and Abdul’s went for his, and there was no more speech to be had between them as they kissed. He knew very well, now, what it looked like when Abdul experienced pleasure, and even from this distance, and in these circumstances, he felt himself ache to be the one giving it. Abdul’s breath grew short, rushing through the soundscape of the dream like it was the only thing that mattered, and Thomas’s mouth grew dry.

 _Here comes the judge_ , the distant music screamed, _hammer in hand, but we’ve all gone deaf to bigots’ commands –_

“Fuck,” Dom gritted out, and Abdul’s hand clenched in his hair, and then they were moaning into each other, mutually holding themselves upright.

Thomas reminded himself to breathe, and, with his pulse pounding in his ears, was proud of himself for managing it.

Abdul recovered first; he looked fond and loving in the half-light, and said something Thomas couldn’t hear into the crook of Dom’s neck.

“Don’t be so romantic, fuck’s sake,” Dom said with a grin, tweaking Abdul’s chin; he was shaking his other hand off towards the ground. “Tell him, you idiot. Pining isn’t a good look on you.”

Abdul laughed, not seeming to take him too seriously. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yes. Why can’t you?”

“Hah,” Abdul said, and now he looked more somber as Dom kissed him briefly again. “He’s not in a position to take me.”

“Sod him, then. Unless he’s a politician or a royal, in which case I want to hear all about it.”

“You’re not far off,” Abdul smiled.

“Jesus,” Dom sighed. “You coming back in?”

“Yeah, in a minute.”

Dom smiled, ran a possessive hand once more across Abdul’s chest, and then turned away, shivering his way back into his clothes and taking a moment to preen before he headed back inside, momentarily letting a thudding beat traipse its way out into the courtyard. Thomas stayed still, willing himself to calm as Abdul, a touch of exhaustion creeping into his shagged-out look, ran a hand down his face and then set to tidying himself up.

It was then that he looked up, straight into the darkness where Thomas was standing, and let his face twist into a sideways smile.

“Enjoy watching, do you?” he called.

Thomas froze. It took him longer than he should have to run at speed through all the possible things he could say or do in his mind, before, taking what little confused courage he had left in his hands, he took a step further out into the light and watched Abdul’s face change.

“Ah,” Walid said, slowly and not a little sad. “This isn’t real.”

He came closer, a trace of hunger sliding into his expression; Thomas swallowed hard, wondering, not for the first time, what on earth these shades he was walking amongst were made of and how much they knew. “What makes you think that?”

“Oh, he was real,” Abdul said, tilting his head towards the door Dom had disappeared into, not taking his eyes off of Thomas. “Quite a pleasant memory, in fact. But this – ”

Thomas felt his back gently hit the wall, and Walid stepped right into him, and his capable, warm hands were on Thomas’s lower abdomen. “This is the stuff of my dreams.”

It was deadly quiet in the courtyard, suddenly, the interior sound of the club the only thing around them, and out of the corner of his eye Thomas could see that, in this new, unbearably fictional part of Abdul’s dream, they were indeed alone.

“Abdul,” he whispered, and he was cut off with a deep, searching kiss that tasted of someone else’s evening of drink, and Abdul’s hands slid lower and, as though practiced at it, pulled his shirtfront out of his trousers and worked open his buttons.

And then Abdul’s lips were no longer on his, but he was kneeling, and they were on Thomas’s stomach instead, and it was all he could do to gasp, thoroughly undone. _God_ , he thought, weakly, and then thought that if Abdul were to wake and not remember this, he would tell him about every second of it, how debauched he had looked under Dom’s hands and how he looked now, looking up at Thomas from below, his hands and now his mouth –

Thomas’s eyes flew open, saw the familiar shapes and outlines of his bedroom in the light of earliest morning, and wondered, in a moment of stupendous frustration, what on earth had happened.

He got his answer a moment later as the mattress creaked beneath him; he turned onto his back to see Abdul sitting up on the edge of his side of the bed, his back to Thomas, running a hand through his hair in the dimness that was seeping through the curtains. He looked like he was struggling for breath, his torso only gradually rising and falling into quiet.

“Where are you going?” Thomas asked, his voice rough; Abdul had turned only half towards him when he spoke again. “You hadn’t finished.”

“My God,” Abdul said – he was wide-eyed and perplexed, the realization only slowly dawning on him. “That was really you?”

He didn’t wait for an answer: he swung himself back into the bed, rolled over into Thomas’s waiting arms, and Thomas, hazily, told himself that it could only be a comfort that the years that they – that he – had wasted weren’t quite so out of reach, after all.

*

**Author's Note:**

> The church/club in question here was the London branch of Limelight; it is now an arts venue called Stone Nest. Chumbawumba's song _Smash Clause 28!_ , protesting the passage of the law which effectively prohibited homosexual 'propaganda' or publishing in the UK in 1988 and was repealed in 2000 (Scotland) / 2003 (rest of the UK), can be listened to [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQUMS3Ny4L8). 
> 
> Title from James Thomson's _A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton_ (1727) yet again. Thanks for reading!


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